For the middle film of the ’80’s Teen Movies Marathon, I went with Rob Reiner‘s 1986 coming-of-age film Stand By Me. To be honest, given the freedom to choose the order of the films I probably would have gone with Stand By Me first, as the characters here are just about to start middle school – significantly younger than the high-school kids featured in the other two movies – but there was a timeslot request, and no particularly good reason not to honor it.
Rob Reiner has called Stand By Me his personal favorite of his films that he has directed. Reiner apparently forgot that he directed The Princess Bride and This Is Spinal Tap when making that proclamation, but so it goes. It is a good film.
Reiner apparently forgot that the bookend was NOT set in 1959
Stand By Me is a bookended film, and we open with out narrator, the elder Gordie Lachance sitting in a car and reading a newspaper about a fatal stabbing. A quick glance at the paper indicates that the victim’s name was Chris Chambers, and if you didn’t miss it, then the reason that Gordie starts reminiscing about an incident in his childhood becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly.
Gordie transports us back to Castle Rock, Oregon, and the Labor Day weekend of 1959. A local boy has gone missing, and protagonist #4, Vern, drops a bomb on his buddies during a treehouse meetup: The kid is dead, and Vern knows basically where to find him.
As it turns out, Vern, through no nefarious intent of his own, overheard his older brother Billy talking about it. Billy hangs out with a rough crowd, and having stolen a car the night before had discovered the dead boy’s body, apparently hit by a train, by the railroad tracks some 20 miles out of town. Billy (and eventually his crew) would like the recognition of finding the body – maybe there’s even a reward! – but knowing where the body was would finger him as the car thief, so that’s no good.
I swear, that’s never happened to me before
But now that the secret of the body is also in the hands of our quartet of 12-year-olds, there’s nothing that’s going to stop these intrepid explorers from lying to their parents about sleepovers at each other’s houses and taking a weekend backpacking trip with the aim of becoming town heroes themselves. It seems a bit thin of a hope, but the reason for a Bildungsroman hike is maybe never all that important.
Chris Chambers (remember him?) steals a gun from his dad for protection on the trip, and the problem of Chekhov’s Gun is solved immediately when Gordie, mistakenly told the gun is not loaded, has an accidental discharge. It only kills a garbage can.
Following a random run-in with Ace (the leader of Billy’s gang) and Eyeball (Chris’ older brother, also a ruffian) the kids collect themselves and are on their way.
A long time ago come a man on a track/Walking fifty miles with a pack on his back
Like all characters in teen movies, our quartet has some pretty serious parental issues. Teddy Duchamp’s father stormed the beach at Normandy, and is now reduced to a violent PTSD case, who severely burned Teddy’s ear (kinda iffy makeup) for some childhood indiscretion. Teddy is torn between considering his father a hero (the face he puts forward to the townspeople who mock him for his father’s mental issues) and an abuser.
Chris is the victim of expectations. Apparently his father is as bad of a seed as his older brother is, and he feels like he’s never going to be given a chance to establish his own reputation. It’s going to be a challenge. When some school milk money had been stolen, he had been immediately suspected…and in fact, he was guilty. But unlike his elder family members he had a twinge of conscience, and turned the money over to a teacher – who instead of returning it to the school pocketed it and bought herself a new skirt. With a family like Chris’, he couldn’t dare to accuse the teacher of such a thing, and so he had to take the punishment without the reward of his repentance.
Gordie is neglected by his father, who preferred his now-tragically-dead elder son (the high-school star quarterback) to his living son (the shy, timid, non-athletic aspiring writer). Gordie used to get encouragement in his writing from his older brother, but at this point seems to have nobody but Chris who recognizes his talent and prods him to stay the course.
And Vern, well, I dunno. Vern’s just a doofus, and that’s reason enough to have issues.
You know, there’s a reason I never liked Old Yeller
On their way to find the body, the kids naturally have a series of adventures. They trespass in Pressman’s junkyard for no apparently good reason other than to tell stories about the vicious attack dog sometimes said to be found therein. The dog goes by the name of Chopper, is likely 675 pounds of pure muscle and teeth, and is known to respond to the command, “Chopper, sic balls!” A pure nightmare scenario. Of course, when the dog is actually loosed on them, it’s nothing more than a regular kind of cute golden retriever, and after jumping a chain link fence to escape it, Gordie narrates how it was a lesson in the vast difference between myth and reality.
I take serious exception to this dismissal. For one, the golden retriever is actually a reasonably large dog – perhaps not the largest, but certainly big enough to cause problems for a 12-year-old. The film shows the dog charging them at high speed, growling, barking aggressively, and even getting a grip on one of the boys’ shirts through the fence that fortunately separates them just in time. This is not a yapping chihuahua, it’s not some cuddly fluffy dog that just wants to be friends, it’s a legitimate threat. And, for the other, I as a child (probably about 9 or 10 years old) was in fact chased down and attacked by none other than a loose golden retriever. It had escaped from its backyard, and as I was walking by on the street, minding my own business and ignorant that it was stalking about, it went into chase mode just like in this film. Like, if I could be triggered, this scene would do it. As I didn’t have a nearby fence to scale or anything more than a second’s notice that the encounter was to happen at all, the dog caught me, knocked me down, and started biting at me. I got up, screaming, and trying to run away only to have the dog grab the back of my shirt. The thing outweighed me. I could not escape. Fortunately my screams alerted a neighbor who came out of their house and ran the dog off, but I was not only traumatized, I was in legitimate danger. So, no, Gordie, Chopper was a serious threat, and your future retconning of the encounter as no big deal is a luxury you have only because Chopper. Didn’t. Catch you. If he had, you’d be singing a different tune. /Rant off.
Thomas, NOOOOO!
In another adventure, our heroes discover that they have to cross a trestle bridge – and nobody knows when the next train is due. Well, they do shortly after they start crossing it, and have to actually outrun the train, with Gordie and Vern barely make it, being forced finally to jump shortly before the bridge ends – but not before they’ve got to a point where the fall is more than about 5-10 feet. They seem OK.
Teddy, AKA Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber
In another adventure, they take a shortcut through a swamp that turns out to be a bit deeper…and a bit more infested with leeches than they might have expected. And these leeches, they’re sneaky ones. They can’t even be deterred by the power of elastic pressure mark worthy tighty-whiteys, as Gordie discovers when he checks on his dingleberry. He faints. I don’t blame him.
Are you lost, boys?
But the biggest adventure of all comes when the kids actually find the body. It turns out that Ace and the gang, after Billy spills the beans about the whereabouts, formulate a plan involving a fake fishing trip that will allow them to “discover” the body without drawing attention to the car theft, and they turn out to be only a few minutes behind. Ace, being a loose cannon, pulls a switchblade and threatens violence. (Yeah, the discovery of this body seems like way too big of a MacGuffin, really.)
It’s all downhill from here, Wesley
But, of course, Gordie still has Chekhov’s Gun, and he makes a stand, even firing off a warning shot to prove it is loaded. “What are you going to do, shoot us all?” Ace asks. The iconic reply comes back, “No, Ace. Just you.” With Chopper-level barks about how they’re not going to forget the incident (which go completely unresolved by the film), Ace and his gang retreat.
Our protagonists head home, too, but in the end decide to phone in the location of the body anonymously, having come to the conclusion that the entire aim to gain recognition by finding it was a bit distasteful.
OK, now THIS part of the bookend is set in 1985. Yup.
And so we ride the narration back into the bookend. Although Vern and Teddy eventually slipped out of their lives, Chris and Gordie remained friends through high school as Chris worked to build his own reputation, eventually becoming a lawyer and a pacifist. He was, as we know, stabbed to death trying to break up a fight, and having learned about it, Gordie has written a story about their 1959 coming-of-age trip. When he finishes, he goes outside to play with his son, refusing to make the same mistakes his father had. The End.
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 